Donald Westlake - Smoke

So Freddie wasn't looking forward to a repetition of that experience anytime soon, except maybe to go in with an Angel of Death kite and swoop it around over their heads until the theater emptied.

Anyway, today he was viewing the rich panorama of street life while time crawled by, and also incidentally looking for a telephone. Peg had suggested he phone her every day when he was ready to come home, and although she said it was because she wanted to be sure she got his lunch on the table at the right time, he knew it was because in her innermost heart she didn't entirely trust him, and wanted him to prove he was actually out of the apartment by phoning her from someplace else.

So yesterday he'd snuck into the manager's office in the movie theater, while the manager was out separating two codgers who were beating on each other with canes in the process of their discussion of whether or not Walter O'Malley was totally culpable in the felonious robbery of the Dodgers from Brooklyn. He'd made his call, assured Peg he was enjoying the movie — Holy Shit III, or whatever it was called — then got out of the way as the manager returned to his office to tend to his nosebleed.

Today, though, was a little different. He was not going back into the Megablok Star, no matter what, not even just to use the phone in the manager's office. He couldn't use a pay phone because he didn't have a quarter on him; in fact, he didn't have anything on him. And pay phones were the only kind of phones to be found out here on the street. But to go inside, into the storefront dentist, or the deli, or the copy shop, or the dry cleaner's, would mean somehow using a telephone right under the eyes — and ears, let's not forget ears — of employees, customers, dentists.

Still, to go home without having made a call would leave Peg convinced he'd never gone out in the first place, which would be not good. The last thing Freddie wanted to do was feed her doubt and paranoia. He was, after all, well known to be a liar and a thief insofar as other people were concerned, so if Peg gave way to occasional suspicion or skepticism she couldn't really be blamed.

And here came a guy talking on the phone. A guy in a tan suit and pale green shirt and dark green tie and brown shoes. A guy in his thirties, with a narrow sandy mustache and sandy hair cropped close all around so his big ears stuck out. One big ear, anyway; the other one would probably stick out, too, but at the moment the cellular phone was pressed against it as the guy walked along, swinging a briefcase in his other hand, chatting away.

It was only envy at first that made Freddie lope along beside this guy, ducking around oncoming pedestrians as he listened to the guy's half of the conversation, learning that he was an insurance salesman calling his office, reporting on his appointments so far today, wondering if there'd been any messages. It should have been a short call, since there weren't any messages for this guy, and not a lot had happened in his appointments till now, but he dragged it out, prolonging it, obviously getting a kick out of walking there on a semicrowded shopping street in Brooklyn in the sunshine talking on his brand-new toy.

Still, the conversation eventually had to wind down, because the secretary or whoever it was at the other end of the call had work to do, couldn't just sit there and play games all day. But the so-longs also stretched out, and then Freddie saw the stocky older woman coming slowly the other way, fresh from the supermarket, weighed down by full plastic bags dragging at each downward arm, slogging ahead flat-footed, oblivious to the world and even to the sight of a tall insurance man in a tan suit talking on the telephone as he walked along the sidewalk.

Good-bye good-bye good-bye. Timing is everything. The woman approached, the guy said yet another good-bye, then thought of one more irrelevant question to ask, started to ask it. The woman passed, headed the opposite way. Freddie plucked the phone out of the guy's hand and dropped it into the woman's right-side shopping bag.

The guy talked another two syllables before he realized the phone wasn't there anymore. Then he stopped dead, said, "Wha?" and moved his now-empty hand, still cupped for the phone, around in front of his eyes, where he could stare at it.

Meanwhile, Freddie backed away out of the flow of foot traffic, stood with his back against the cool glass of the nearest storefront window — ladies' garments, latest styles, large sizes a specialty — and watched to see what would happen next, which was that the woman kept trudging homeward with her groceries, unaware of anything at all occurring anywhere in the world, while the guy in the tan suit started spinning in circles, looking down, out, up, around, everywhere. A couple of little kids, bopping along, deep in their own conversation, stopped to look at this weird grown-up, and the grown-up stopped his whirling to glare at them and shout, "Where is it?"

"Where's what?" one of the kids asked, while the other kid, wiser in the ways of adults, said, "We don't have it."

"I want my phone!"

"There's a phone on the corner," the wiser kid suggested, pointing.

"I want my phone!"

An older guy with half a dozen magazines under his arm stopped to say, "What's the problem?"

"My phone, I—" The guy would have torn his hair if it weren't too short to get hold of. "I was talking on it, and it disappeared!"

"Your telephone disappeared?"

"Yes!"

"Right out of your hand?"

"Yes!"

"That's like the missing Ambroses," the older guy said.

Freddie and both kids now gave this new arrival a lot closer attention, realizing he was going to be more interesting than they'd thought. The insurance man, glaring pop-eyed, cried, "Ambroses? Ambroses?"

"Sure," the other guy said. "Somebody was collecting Ambroses, Charles Fort wrote about it."

The insurance man had expected skepticism, scorn, disbelief; he hadn't expected Ambroses. "What the hell has that got to do," he cried passionately, "with my phone ?"

The other guy took his magazines out from under his arm and started to leaf through them, as though one might contain an article explaining where the insurance man's telephone had gone. "Then there's Judge Crater," he said. "Now, in parapsychology—"

"I don't want any of your crap !" the insurance man screamed, waving his arms around. "I want my phone!"

It seemed to Freddie the insurance man was doing a very nice job of drawing attention to himself and away from anything else that might happen on this block, so, while all eyes turned toward this unexpected entertainment on the sidewalk, Freddie skipped through the gathering throng and went off in pursuit of the woman with the shopping bags. She was still plodding forward, step after step, doggedly homeward bound.

Unfortunately, just as Freddie arrived, the woman stopped. She frowned. She gazed down at the shopping bag into which Freddie had dropped the phone. Her eyes widened. "Hello?" she said.

Now what? Freddie had just caught up, and had been about to reach into that bag to retrieve the phone, but he couldn't very well do that with the woman staring at the bag that way.

Then things got worse. One-armed, the woman raised that plastic bag toward her head, a listening expression on her face. And then Freddie could hear it, too. In a tiny tinny voice, the plastic bag was saying, "Hello? Hello?"

The woman screamed, sensibly enough. Then she dropped the plastic bag onto the sidewalk — something glass broke in there, Freddie heard it — and legged it down the street at a milk-horse trot, listing to the side where she still toted groceries, but making good headway nonetheless.

So now while most of the people on the street were watching the insurance man do his mad lost-telephone dance, the rest of the people on the street turned to watch the fershlugginer woman with the one plastic bag, trotting and shrieking. A great moment for Freddie to retrieve the phone, which he did, and scoot with it into the tapered recess of the storefront dentist's entryway. Hunkering down there, so he could keep the phone below the level of the storefront window — he didn't want the receptionist in there to have to wonder why a cellular phone was flying solo in her doorway — he raised it and heard the thing still going, "Hello? Hello?"